Australia may be pushing on a closed door

Australia’s top-level relationship with China has gone from the shop counter to the buddy system in the past decade with very mixed results.

That’s why the effort this week to create a regular, structured, high-level dialogue to embrace political, strategic and business issues is a challenging but nevertheless crucial evolution.

Former prime minister
John Howard
sought to pigeon hole the different spheres of engagement and made a success of the idea that the culturally and politically different nations could do business.

But that was a different era, before the great foreign investment flood, before Australian citizens were in Chinese jails over business disputes and before China was such an obvious rival of the United States in the region.

Kevin Rudd
leapt over the shop counter to declare (in Mandarin) that Australia was a special friend and so could tell the Chinese a few home truths about human rights.

It was a case of confusing a deep personal knowledge of China with the need for an enduring framework to accommodate a less knowledgeable future prime minister from either side of the fence.

Both approaches had some merit but they left Australia without the annual strategic and economic dialogue that the US has conducted with Beijing since 2009 and previously in a different form.

And according to research by the Lowy Institute’s Linda Jakobson, at least eight G20 countries have a cabinet level strategic dialogue with China, underlining how Australia has lost focus on the top level with its multiplicity of lower level annual gatherings.

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As former ambassador
Geoff Raby
said in his submission to the Asian Century white paper: “ Regular high-level meetings are perhaps the most important way to ensure our voice and our concerns are heard and for us to build confidence and trust with a view to influencing China to our points of view."

The number of these arrangements China already has in place explains why Australia may possibly be pushing on a partly closed door.

The devil will be in the detail as to how this process develops and matures to allow discussion about issues such as the South China Sea or different judicial treatment of ethnic Chinese Australian citizens.

And both sides will have to be prepared to really order their priorities and then take action to expand the relationship.

But if
Julia Gillard
secures an annual prime ministerial to premier gathering she will have at least established the sort of structure Australia has with Indonesia, which will both provide a platform and require her successors to take China seriously.